Presidential Address
Good morning everyone, as always, hope you are well. If you are not well then I learned the other day that, as society president and in absence of a dedicated appointment, I am your wellbeing officer: go figure 👨🌾. This week you may notice I've also given our email template some TLC and have graduated to a proper email management system; its called listmonk if you're interested - open source of course. This means that the option to manually subscribe to the mailing list and view emails online should be available very soon.
Anyway, we've finally got our act together and got some events planned 👏: take a look at what other events you can look forward to beyond just this next one.
This Week's Event
Introduction To Web Development: Replicating Google
Wednesday 16th October 17:00 - 19:30 @ PZA/113
In 2 hours, you're going to replicate the ENTIRETY OF Google. Ok well maybe not. We're going to show you a range of basic web development concepts from placing elements on a page, through styling and positioning them to adding basic interactive functionality with JavaScript. The aim of the session will be to replicate the look of main Google search page at (https://google.com) but the concepts learned will allow you to build simple websites of your own including any of the features mentioned above. If you've already got experience with Web Development then still feel free to come along, help others or show us your best spoof Google website! As usual, bring your laptop and there is no obligation to stay for the full event duration.
Upcoming Events
- Week 5: An introduction to modern web development. How does developing 'real world' applications these days differ from the basics? Learn about the role of frameworks such as React or Angular and how these simplify large web development projects by offering greater structure, reusability and maintainability.
- Week 6: Mini-Project - Making a web-based chat room. In this session, we'll guide you through creating your very own custom web-chat. You'll be able to put your knowledge learned so far into practise, creating and styling a front-end for your application and adding interactive features. We can then explore how APIs and websockets facilitate communication between your web-page, a back-end server and, indirectly, other clients.
- Week 7: Malicious requests. I'm quite excited about this one. We'll be looking at an example website and you'll be getting hands on using SQL Injection, request interception and other tricks to make the website behave in ways it wasn't supposed to. In the process, you'll learn about website security best practises and how to ensure websites you build aren't vulnerable to the same exploits as Dr Plump's (nothing to do with Detlef Plump the lecturer).
- Week 8: IOT WebDev. We'll be pivoting to look at back end development, how can we write APIs for our web pages to interact with? How can we make these APIs usable for other processes? To make this more interesting, we'll hopefully be getting some EPS32 development boards so we can explore back-end development in the context of interacting with the real world!
- -- and more to follow --
I'm also going to be launching the Home Lab user group very soon, with the first session to be held in Week 6 just after consolidation week. If you're at all interested in Open Source or self-hosting then make sure you look out for that.
Other than that, have a good week, stay healthy and see you on Wednesday!
Regards,
Will & The YorDevs Team
